Book
Every facet of our lives depends on the decisions we make, yet why are some of us better than others at committing to a decision?
What are the forces at play holding us back and how can we move from indecision to smart choices?
‘To be or not to be?’ Life’s eternal question. Bikart turns Shakespeare’s iconic words on their head and instead poses the more revealing question ‘what in me cannot decide?’
The Art of Decision Making is your guidebook to transform will into action. Whether it is career change, choice of partner (or the decision to go your separate ways), or even coping with the middle-age malaise of having made all the wrong decisions, you will be asked the right questions to pull you out of the purgatory of indecision to confronting difficult choices and dealing with their outcomes.
Drawing from philosophy, psychology, literature and theology, Joseph Bikart uses decades of experience as an advisor to leading companies around the world to explore how and why we make decisions and how to restore volition.
In the words of Miles Davis, ‘It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note, it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”
The book is broken into four parts and punctuated with short practical essays. Bikart presents a lively and compelling exploration of the process of decision making covering:
1. Indecision, indecision: What makes us indecisive? What holds us back and why? The conflict between our heads and our hearts.
2. Where Art Thou?: How and where we get stuck and the importance of relaxing one’s grip.
3. The Momentum of Decisiveness: Keeping our focus and progressing us from will to action.
4. The Deciding Mind: Making our smartest choices and the importance of perspective.
The book starts with the question: how can we, as human beings, become better decision-makers? And ends on a different question: how can we, as decision-makers, become better human beings?
The Art of Decision Making presents a unique perspective on what to do at the proverbial fork in the road and Bikart’s philosophy is insightful, thought provoking, and potentially life-changing.
‘There is a Hamlet in each of us—troubled hours where we are called to choose and yet flee that appointment.
In The Art of Decision Making, Joseph Bikart explores the anatomy of this perpetual dilemma: which factors lead to choice, and which keep us from choosing?
Bikart leads the reader to greater understanding, greater accountability, and greater facility in cutting through the nettlesome thicket of life to a place of resolve.’
- James Hollis, Ph.D, Bestselling author of Living an Examined Life